Topic: U.S. Men's Soccer

Michael Bradley might have been the best American player in European soccer. Instead, he decided to come home and play in the MLS. It's a big deal, for him and his league, even though the story's a long way from finished.

A date with a World Cup Group of Death looms, and USMNT players are bailing on European leagues to join MLS squads. How bad any of this is depends on your perspective, but it's almost certainly not as bad as this.

Michael Bradley is one of America's best soccer players, and very much in his prime, which makes it that much more surprising that he's coming home to America's soccer league. But maybe he and Major League Soccer both know what they're doing.

At times, Jozy Altidore both looks like and is the most electrifying American soccer player in recent memory. At other times, during his peripatetic and mostly unhappy pro career in Europe, he really doesn't. The fun, and the emotion, comes from watching him figure it out.

Estadio Azteca is one of the stranger, better and more terrifying places on earth to watch a soccer game. And maybe to watch anything, actually. Two Azteca veterans compare notes on one of soccer's holy, and wholly weird, sites.

Jurgen Klinsmann was hired to overhaul the U.S. Men's National Team, and lay the foundation for the future of American soccer. But to finish the job, let alone be around to finish it, he'll have to survive the present.

Call it soccer diplomacy if you like, but American coaches have slowly won over the hearts and minds—and won quite a few games, in the case of new Egyptian National Team head coach Bob Bradley—of soccer teams from the Netherlands to Iran.

It took 75 years, but the U.S. Men's Soccer team finally won a game in Mexico thanks to a 1-0 win in a skeleton-crew friendly on Wednesday night at Estadio Azteca. The result was about as meaningful as meaningless games get.

Clint Dempsey just finished the best season any American soccer player has ever had in Europe. He is about to get very, very rich because of it. But the enigmatic dude from Nacogdoches, Texas remains stubbornly, and more than a little admirably, hard to know.